I don't know how the White House decided whether the New Yorker's David Remnick or The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg was going to write an insufferably fawning profile of the "great man" on Election Day.
But the coin was flipped. Goldberg got Kissinger. Remnick got Obama.
But instead of the triumph, Remnick had to write an elegiac portrait of a noble Obama confronting an inconceivable defeat.
"The White House was, as one staffer told me, “like a funeral home.” You could see it all around: aides walking through the lobby, hunched, hushed, vacant-eyed. "
Here's how it all happened.
On Election Night, Obama was upstairs in the White House residence. Tens of millions of people turned on televisions and started checking their phones and laptops long before the polls on the East Coast closed, but Obama did not. “I generally don’t start paying attention to returns until, like, ten o’clock,” he said, “because, first of all, I got a lot of people who do that for me, and, second of all, there’s really nothing there, so it’s all a bunch of speculation or anxiety that’s playing itself out, and people are attaching themselves to various numbers.”
It's nice when you've got a lot of people to do it for you.
At around 7:30 p.m., Obama heard from David Simas that there were some “surprising numbers” coming from rural counties in Florida. Trump was ahead by a much bigger margin than the models had anticipated—“and, in fact, a larger margin than Romney had beaten me in these areas, or McCain had beaten me in these areas.”
Uh-oh.
Even by ten o’clock, Obama said, “I’m still not watching television, which is just a general rule that I’ve maintained for the last eight years, not watching political television.”
Obama can't tell a story without patting himself on the back. Even a story in which he loses.
By then, it was clear that the models were wrong and that Clinton was going to lose North Carolina and Florida—and that the difficulties she was having in the South were showing up in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Obama is hardly as cool and bloodless as advertised, but he will not perform, or even recount, his emotions on command.
Of course not. It gets in the way of manufacturing his image. The real Obama is utterly inaccessible even to a towel boy like Remnick.
But the great man of the left is still getting his narratives from Ben Rhodes.
Soon after the election had been called for Trump, Obama told them, Ben Rhodes had e-mailed to say that sometimes history zigzags. Obama seized on that.
Of course he did. History will still validate him. It'll just take more time. Because it's all about him.